Roman Catholic Cardinal. A native of Schwelm, Johannes Joachim Degenhardt attended the humanistic Albrecht Dürer Gymnasium and belonging to the Catholic Youth Group "Bund Neudeutschland", after being was banned by the Nazis, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941, having co-organized a demonstration of young people to show loyalty towards Msgr. Lorenz Jäger on the day of his consecration as archbishop of Paderborn. Held in solitary confinement for several weeks at the Dortmund Gestapo headquarters, he was beaten by the guards and not released until Christmas of 1941, with the warning that he would be sent to a concentration camp should he talk to anyone about his imprisonment. Expelled from the gymnasium soon after his release, he was conscripted as an aid in the Luftwaffe and, taken prisoner, was released in 1946. Resuming his studies at the end of the conflict, he was ordained priest by Archbishop Lorenz Jäger in Paderborn's cathedral. Curate in Brackwede for five years, he was appointed administrator of the priest's office in 1957, until being named prefect of the Archiepiscopal Collegium Leonium in Paderborn. Earning a doctorate in theology in 1964, he was named assistant professor at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Named university chaplain at the Pädagogischen Hochschule Westfalen Lippe in 1965, in February that year, he was assigned as the diocese's representative of the Katholisches Bibelwerk. Pope Paul VI elected him bishop of the titular see of Vicus Pacati and appointed him auxiliary for the archdiocese of Paderborn on March 18, 1968, receiving his episcopal consecration from Cardinal Jäger on the following May 1. Following Jäger's retirement in 1973, the cathedral chapter of the archdiocese elected Degenhardt as their curate while the named Pontiff Paul VI appointed him archbishop of the metropolitan see on April 4, 1974. Unexpectedly, Pope John Paul II created Degenhardt cardinal priest in the consistory of January 28, 2001 with the title of San Liborio, with the Pontiff himself explaining his elevation a year later on the occasion of Degenhardt's death in a letter of condolence written from the World Youth Day in Toronto: "With his appointment to Cardinal, I wanted to make visible the faithful evidence of the Paderborn spiritual leader to the entire world." A conservative prelate, known among others as a staunch opponent of abortion as well as an advocate of political cooperation in Europe and tolerance between Germans and foreigners, Degenhardt died suddenly in the early morning of July 25, 2002 in the archiepiscopal palace of Paderborn of cardiac related problems. In the days that followed, thousands passed by the Cardinal's body during the lying in state in the Bartholomäuskapelle in Paderborn. The funeral took place on August 3 at the cathedral of Paderborn in the presence of nine cardinals along with over sixty archbishops and bishops from all over the world and numerous state guests. The ceremony, of which the entrance of the numerous dignitaries into the cathedral alone took twenty minutes, making it the largest funeral ceremony in the history of Paderborn, was concluded with the Cardinal's interment in the cathedral crypt.